Vote Leave sites get Lego lecture

With just days to go until the U.K.'s EU referendum, British voters looking for information on the Leave campaign have been getting a surprise — an explainer on EU migration using Lego figures.

In April, Vote Leave was named the official Brexit campaign, but no one from the group had bothered to register the relevant domain names, which had already been snapped up.

Since then, visitors to voteleave.co.uk, voteleave.com, voteleave.org and three other variations on the theme have been "rickrolled" — given an unexpected blast of the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song Never Gonna Give You Up.

Now, however, these sites have a more serious message.

The man behind the stunt is Mario Van Poppel, a Belgian living in Britain who runs a currency exchange business and backs Remain. He says he bought the domain names in September 2015 and offered them to the Vote Leave team in exchange for a donation to charity, but never heard back.

Now he has changed tactics and is using the sites to push a pro-EU message, giving information on migration that runs counter to that from Brexit campaigners, and using Lego figures to make his point. "Don’t let anyone fool you, or worse, scare you," visitors to the sites are told.

The official web address of the Vote Leave campaign is voteleavetakecontrol.org